Before I get started on the blog post let me wish everyone Happy Cinco de Mayo! Done correctly this is the last of five days of celebrating Cinco De Mayo. I just opened a ice cold bottle of Corona to help me start/finish my personal Cinco de Mayo celebration.
Mary Lynn and I spent last night and today in Salt Lake City, Utah. Actually we spent today running errands and shopping while the RV had it's 16,000 mile service performed at Freightliner of Utah. Great organization by the way -- they treated us really well and the service organization does a great job -- highly recommend them.
Mary Lynn felt like she had hit the shopping Trifecta: Costco, Sam's and a Walmart SuperCenter. Wow - where is all that stuff going to go in the RV? Truthfully she did pretty good and kept the purchases to essentials, well, almost.
I mentioned in a previous post where one of the RV compartment doors came open when we hit a rough patch in the road, well, that was really my mistake. I should have made sure that compartment was closed tightly by locking the compartment door. I was lucky I only lost a bag of tools, however like most lessons, this one required a price to be paid. Today I stopped at a Sears to start replacing the lost tools.
I was able to hit the bargain bins in the tool department for several items plus a new soft canvas bag, however even hitting the sales I spent $143 and have only replaced about half of the tools lost. MLA keeps saying "But it was a small bag of tools". Hard to explain just how expensive tools are to her. I keep telling her it could have been a lot worse but she gives that silent, skeptical look that basically translates to "Dale, you are an idiot". But I'm her idiot and so it goes...
As RV lessons go, this one is not too expensive. Not like our friends who left Tucson pulling their toad only to look in the side mirror as they roared down the on ramp and saw their toad in flames. It seems they forgot to properly set the toad's transmission before setting off. They did $15,000 worth of damage to their toad plus a big hit to their confidence. Ouch -- now that's an expensive lesson!
By the time they told MLA & I about the fire they were able to laugh about the whole event, although, now that I think about it, they only told us the story after several glasses of wine.
The RV service was pretty quick although I had them troubleshoot a wiring problem for our toad's left turn signal and brake light. I spent about 6 hours troubleshooting this problem last week and had traced the problem all the way back to the RV's wiring loom.
Short version is there were three blown fuses. That is really frustrating since I checked both of the fuse boxes and all the fuses were good. The service technician laughed and said let me show you the third fuse box that's hidden inside the engine compartment. OMG -- who hides fuse boxes?
The old "Hidden Fuse Box" lesson cost me $177.75. The $177 was the time the technician spent diagnosing the problem. The .75 cents? That was the cost of the three fuses... To realize I could have fixed this myself for only 75 cents.... Ahhhhhhhh!
Oh well, everything was working by 4 pm this afternoon so we hit the road. Salt Lake City sits between two mountain ranges, both of which still have snow capped peaks. The setting is absolutely beautiful however the section of the city that we were in was run down and depressing. We really didn't want to spent another night there so we hit the road and drove to Pocatello, Idaho.
Typical for Idaho: Pocatello is a small community set in a spectacular setting. First thing I did after setting up camp was to get out the collapsible ladder and scrub the front windshield. As a parting gift, the city of Salt Lake City deposited ~1 million bugs on our windshield as we scooted out of town and past the lake. The front of the RV is still covered however the windshield is now clear.
I'm sure our travels in Canada and Alaska will deposit even more bugs (especially mosquito's) on the front of the RV however that's a small price to pay for the trip of a lifetime...
We should leave Montana and officially start our Alaska trip on May 13. Yee Haw!
See Ya!
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